Once upon a time... in Siem Reap

Cambodia: Part One.

"To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wildflower.

To hold heaven in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour..."

Augeries of Innocence, William Blake

We arrived in Siem Reap, the “temple capital” of Cambodia (and probably the world) ready for some sightseeing. After the whole Chinese Visa shenanigan in Bangkok, we didn’t get to see the temples of Thailand’s capital and felt we needed to tick some boxes off our bucket lists. So, we bravely bought a three day temple pass and arranged a motor-rickshaw that would take us to see them. First stop: the stunning Angkor Wat. Boasting an area of 820,000 square metres, Angkor Wat, meaning “Temple City” is the biggest temple in the world. It deserved the time that we dedicated to walking around its intricately carved walls, studying the stories depicted from Hindu mythology that my grandmother used to recite to me and my brother when we were younger.

Our guide for the day explained many of the small but significant details that we would have missed had we wandered around alone. His words took us to the 12th Century where Angkor, the highly sophisticated centre of the powerful Khmer Empire, now known as Cambodia, was the largest city in the pre-industrial world. Unfortunately, this grand past only made Cambodia’s poverty-stricken present seem all the more melancholic. Today, like many Asian cities, the roads of Siem Reap bustle with children begging for milk or money, while rats as big as cats scurry along the piles of rubbish in the residential areas almost intimidating the skinny cats eyeing up the enormous cockroaches that infest the rubbish-filled side streets of this fallen city. We spent the next two days making the most of our passes, going from one spectacular temple to the next, losing ourselves in beautiful brickwork, the sheer size of the stone structures making our constantly sweat-soaked bodies feel all the more inferior. I still can’t decide if the time seemed to pass by quickly, or stop altogether, but we always left each temple feeling as though we had been suspended in a time frame too complex to be measured by minutes. And then the third day arrived. And I admit it. I’d had enough. I had no desire to see any more temples, and would have gladly spent the day reading by the hostel pool if it hadn’t been for guilt threatening to occupy my mind. So I dragged myself to the last part of the temple trail with an over enthusiastic Isma, and was truly taken aback by the surreal temple of Ta Prohm, also known as the “Tomb Raider Temple”. We sat eating mangoes near the famous tangled tree that eerily grows out of the ruins, and it was instantly clear why such a dream-like setting was chosen for a mystical video game; however, I was yet to make the uncanny connection between the trees’ relentless roots and the dark history of Cambodia that we were about to discover... Continued in Cambodia: Part Two

Guess what I found out in Siem Reap?

1. Siem is the Khmer / Cambodian word for Siam or Thailand. The name Siem Reap therefore translates as 'Defeat of Siam’, Siam referring to the ‘Siamese’ or Thai people that tried to invade Cambodia but failed. Even today, there is conflict between the two countries. 2. Angkor Wat was originally a Hindu temple, devoted to Vishnu, the god of preservation and protection. It was towards the end of the 12th century that a new king, Jayavarman VII converted to Buddhism and added statues of Buddhas to Angkor Wat. His successor, Jayavarman VIII, destroyed the heads of many of the Buddhas and changed others to make them look Hindu! It was in the 14th and 15th century that Buddhist monks from Sri Lanka changed the religion of the temple to Buddhism once again. Today, the Khmer people pray to both Hindu and Buddhist gods. 3. There are actually over one thousand temples in the Angkor area, but the main attraction, Angkor Wat, attracts around two million visitors a year.